Frank Lloyd Wright began building Taliesin in 1911 as a retreat from a scandal of his own making: in 1909 he had left his wife Catherine and their six children in Oak Park to travel to Europe with Mamah Borthwick Cheney, the wife of a former client, and by the time he came home neither Chicago society nor the press had forgiven him. Taliesin, built on land his mother's Welsh family had farmed for generations, was meant to be a place where he and Borthwick could simply live, away from the scrutiny.
That first version of Taliesin stood for three years. On August 15, 1914, while Wright was in Chicago overseeing work on Midway Gardens, a man named Julian Carlton, hired that summer as a servant, set fire to the house's living quarters and attacked the household with a hatchet as they tried to escape the flames. He killed Borthwick, her two children John and Martha Cheney, and four others on the estate. Carlton swallowed hydrochloric acid in an apparent suicide attempt afterward and survived only 47 days in custody, dying before he could be tried and explain, in his own words, why he had done it. Wright learned of the attack by telegram and returned to bury Borthwick himself, in a plain wooden coffin, in the graveyard of the small chapel his family had built decades earlier.
He rebuilt. The second Taliesin rose on the same foundations within a year, and Wright kept working, and kept living there, through the 1920s. In 1925 a second fire broke out, this one accidental, caused by a lightning-damaged telephone line arcing during an electrical storm; Wright lost the living quarters again, along with a substantial part of his art collection, though not any lives this time. He rebuilt a third time, and this final version of Taliesin, extended and revised for the rest of his life, is the building that stands today.
In 1932, deep in the Depression with commissions scarce, Wright and his wife Olgivanna opened Taliesin to paying apprentices, founding the Taliesin Fellowship: young architects worked the estate's farm, cooked, built, and studied under Wright directly, in a program that shaped much of the next generation of American architecture and that continued, at both Taliesin and its winter counterpart Taliesin West in Arizona, until his death in 1959. The estate that had been rebuilt from tragedy twice became, by the end of Wright's life, the place where he had trained more architects than any single school could claim credit for.